Haha agreed, if we’re talking about kilobytes of missing data brute forcing is intractable.
There may be structure to exploit in the data format. E.g. if you’re recovering missing content from a book written in English, you can probably get away with enumerating only printable ASCII and 90% of the letters will be lowercase.
But practically, I am unconvinced because the information density is pretty high on the kinds of things people like to torrent.
On average it’ll take 2^(n-1) guesses to reconstruct 2^n bits, so… depends on how many hashes / sec you can do.
Let me save you some time: not enough.
Haha agreed, if we’re talking about kilobytes of missing data brute forcing is intractable.
There may be structure to exploit in the data format. E.g. if you’re recovering missing content from a book written in English, you can probably get away with enumerating only printable ASCII and 90% of the letters will be lowercase.
But practically, I am unconvinced because the information density is pretty high on the kinds of things people like to torrent.